Daily Rainfall Estimate by Emissivity Temporal Variation from 10 Satellites
AbstractRainfall retrieval algorithms for passive microwave radiometers often exploits the brightness temperature depression due to ice scattering at high frequency channels (≥ 85 GHz) over land. This study presents an alternate method to estimate the daily rainfall amount using the emissivity temporal variation (i.e., Δe) under rain-free conditions at low frequency channels (19, 24 and 37 GHz). Emissivity is derived from 10 passive microwave radiometers, including the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Microwave Imager (GMI), the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2), three Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS), the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS), and four Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit-A (AMSU-A). Four different satellite combination schemes are used to derive the Δe for daily rainfall estimates. They are all-10-satellites, 5-imagers, 6-satellites with very different equator crossing times, and GMI-only. Results show that Δe from all-10-satellites has the best performance with a correlation of 0.60 and RMSE of 6.52 mm, comparing with the integrated multi-satellite retrievals (IMERG) final run product. The 6-satellites scheme has comparable performance with all-10-satellites scheme. The 5-imagers scheme performs noticeably worse with a correlation of 0.49 and RMSE of 7.28 mm, while the GMI-only scheme performs the worst with a correlation of 0.25 and RMSE of 11.36 mm. The inferior performance from the 5-imagers and GMI-only schemes can be explained by the much longer revisit time, which cannot accurately capture the emissivity temporal variation.